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SpaceX’s Starhopper gains thruster pods as hop test preparations ramp up
Amid a flurry of new construction at SpaceX’s Boca Chica facilities, technicians have begun to install thruster pods on Starhopper in anticipation of the prototype’s first untethered flights.
According to CEO Elon Musk, Starhopper’s “untethered hover tests” will begin with just one Raptor engine installed, potentially allowing hops to restart within the next few weeks. SpaceX is currently testing Raptor SN03 (and possibly SN02) a few hundred miles north in McGregor, Texas, just a few hours’ drive south once the engine is deemed flight-ready. Meanwhile, Starhopper itself needs a considerable amount of new hardware before it can begin Raptor-powered flight testing.
A Falcon Raptor-powered Starship
Purely from a visible perspective, the most important component Starhopper is missing is a way to control its attitude and remain stable while under Raptor power, particularly critical for hovering. Enter the aptly-named attitude control system (ACS), essentially a pod of omnidirectional thrusters. SpaceX already happens to have its own extremely mature ACS proven over nearly two dozen successful Falcon 9 and Heavy booster landings, as well as every Falcon upper stage that has ever flown. SpaceX’s ACS is based on powerful nitrogen gas thrusters, known for their white puffs during Falcon 9 booster recovery and landing operations.
On May 6th and 7th, SpaceX began to install what looked like Falcon ACS pods on Starhopper. Curiously, of the two pairs of thrusters now installed, half appear to be taken directly off of older mothballed Falcon 9 boosters, while the other two seem to have been acquired from a Falcon 9 Block 5 rocket. The latter pods may very well have come from Falcon 9 B1050, the booster that unintentionally landed in the Atlantic Ocean last December.
Based on the asymmetric location of the first two pod groups, Starhopper’s ACS will probably use a tripod layout. Additionally, the reason for the thruster pairs – versus Falcon 9’s single pods – is likely simple: Starhopper is far heavier than a Falcon booster. To get the same level of control authority, SpaceX is thus pairing pods together to double the functional strength of Starhopper’s ACS.
This leads smoothly to the installation of two (likely soon to be three) new composite-overwrapped pressure vessels (COPVs). Starhopper already has two COPVs installed on the outside of its upper tank dome, now effectively confirmed to be helium containers needed to pressurize the vehicle’s methane and oxygen tanks. Based on the fact that Starhopper’s new ACS pods appear to have come straight from Falcon boosters, it’s safe to say that the 2 (or 3) new COPVs will supply the hopper’s thrusters with gaseous nitrogen.
The Ugly Starshipling
In general, this is just the latest chapter in the book of the oddity that is Starhopper. With helium tank pressurization and nitrogen ACS thrusters taken straight from Falcon 9, a major facet of SpaceX’s Mars architecture is entirely missing from the prototype. Known as autogenous pressurization, BFR was meant to use gasified versions of its onboard liquid oxygen and methane to pressurize its propellant tanks. In a similar vein, BFR was expected to integrated the same propellant into its ACS. Simply put, helium is simply out of the question if SpaceX wants to realize its reusable Mars transport architecture. Mars does have a minute quantity of nitrogen available in its already very thin atmosphere, but extracting hundreds or thousands of kilograms is impractical in the near-term, particularly if the first Starship have to carry all of their extraction equipment from Earth.
Although Musk has seemingly confirmed that Starship and Super Heavy will use ACS thrusters more akin to the Falcon family’s cold nitrogen gas pods, he did also confirm that autogenous pressurization would be a part of even the earliest iterations of the rocket. The move from carbon fiber to steel tanks likely made a major difference, as carbon composites have extremely limited heat resistance.
Without autogenous pressurization and propellant tanks closer to the thickness of orbit-capable Starships, Starhopper is really more of a mobile test stand for Raptor than anything else. The ungainly vehicle also offers SpaceX engineers an opportunity to test Starship/Super Heavy avionics in flight conditions, particularly with respect to controlling a real Raptor engine on the fly.
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Elon Musk
The Boring Company’s newest tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla parts and no one is driving it
The Boring Company’s new tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla Model 3 batteries and drive units.
The Boring Company just introduced a new piece of hardware, and it runs on parts pulled straight from a Tesla showroom. Liner Truck 3, unveiled in a post from the tunneling company’s official X account, is an all electric vehicle built around Tesla Model 3 battery packs and drive units, purpose built to move concrete tunnel segments to the boring machine face without a single person underground.
Introducing Liner Truck 3 — our latest fully electric tunnel vehicle.
– Tesla Model 3 battery and drive units
– Transports 22,000+ lb of concrete segments to the boring machine
– 28 miles of range
– 12 mph max operating speed
– Remotely piloted from Global OCC in Texas, with… pic.twitter.com/XB7FgSXnpy— The Boring Company (@boringcompany) August 7, 2026
The job itself is unglamorous but critical. Each precast segment run weighs more than 22,000 pounds, roughly the load of a full cement mixer, and Liner Truck 3 hauls that weight repeatedly between the surface staging area and wherever the Prufrock machine happens to be cutting.
The Boring Company said Liner Truck 3 is piloted remotely out of its Global Operations Control Center in Texas, extending the Zero-People-In-Tunnel approach the company has spent years building toward. An earlier version of a ZPIT liner truck was already tested at the company’s Bastrop, Texas research tunnels, and a factory tour released last month showed an employee flying a fully loaded liner truck with a PlayStation controller. Liner Truck 3 looks like the production version of that same idea, cleaned up and pushed into daily use.
The timing lines up with a company digging in more places than it ever has before. The Boring Company now has multiple Prufrock machines active or arriving in Nashville, where Music City Loop construction has been accelerating since February, and its Vegas Loop network keeps adding tunnel mileage on a near monthly basis. Every one of those projects depends on getting concrete segments to the cutting face fast enough to keep the boring machine from idling, which is exactly the bottleneck Liner Truck 3 is designed to remove.
It also reinforces something Tesla owners have watched happen gradually across Musk’s companies: passenger car hardware finding a second life in heavy equipment. Model 3 drive units already move people through the Vegas Loop, and now the same components are hauling concrete underground in Nashville and wherever The Boring Company digs next. Whether that kind of component reuse extends further into TBC’s equipment lineup, or into other Musk owned industrial hardware, is the next thing worth watching.
SpaceX stock did the opposite of what most of Wall Street expected this week, when the day designed to be its most dangerous turned into a rally, and the rally kept going.
Thursday marked the first major lockup expiration since SpaceX’s June IPO, making roughly 911.5 million insider held shares eligible to trade for the first time, more than doubling the company’s public float. Analysts and short sellers had spent weeks bracing for a flood of selling, especially after the stock fell 13 percent following its first earnings report as a public company on Tuesday. Instead, shares rose 6.1 percent Thursday to close at $114.92, and by Friday they were trading near $129, up more than another 12 percent on the day.
SpaceX shorts get warned by Musk ally, echoing Tesla’s early struggles
The setup made the outcome notable. Short interest had climbed to roughly 34 percent of the float heading into earnings, among the highest of any large cap stock, with about 95 percent of available shares to borrow already on loan. CEO Elon Musk warned short sellers twice in the weeks before the lockup, writing on X that “the survival probability of firms who maintain a significant short position in SpaceX over time is very low,” then following up on the morning of earnings with “I try to warn them, but they just double down.”
When the newly unlocked shares hit the market and the selloff never showed up, some of that short position appears to have started unwinding. TipRanks reported that options activity shifted toward bullish strategies like put selling and risk reversals following the rally, with roughly $600 million in options premium trading Thursday alone. Retail buyers also stepped in during the earnings dip, according to Vanda Research.
The fundamentals behind the stock have not changed much in a week. SpaceX’s revenue nearly doubled year over year to $7.8 billion, with Starlink subscribers doubling to 12 million and the company’s AI segment growing 247 percent. What spooked investors on Tuesday was the spending side. Capital expenditures jumped to more than $18 billion for the quarter, up from $2.8 billion a year earlier, with AI investment alone rising from $749 million to $15.8 billion. Wall Street remains split on whether that spending is building infrastructure SpaceX needs or outrunning what the business can currently support, a debate Teslarati has tracked since shares first came under pressure.
None of that resolves the bigger question hanging over the stock. Thursday’s release was only the first of nine staggered lockup tranches, with roughly $800 billion worth of additional shares scheduled to become eligible through October, and Musk’s own stake stays locked until next June. If this week is any indication, the market is treating that supply as something it can absorb rather than something to fear, at least for now.
News
The Boring Company’s newest Vegas Station has a permit quietly waiting behind it
Sahara Las Vegas opened a new Vegas Loop station, joining an exclusive two resort transit club.
Sahara Las Vegas opened a new Vegas Loop station Thursday, giving The Boring Company’s underground transit system its northernmost stop yet on the Strip. The station sits at Sahara’s Paradise Road entrance, on the southeast corner of Las Vegas Boulevard and Sahara Avenue, and connects riders to the Las Vegas Convention Center, other Strip resorts on the network and, eventually, Harry Reid International Airport.
The addition makes Sahara the second resort, after Fontainebleau opened its own station in January, to get a stop built at street level rather than tucked into the property itself. Sahara now joins Westgate as the only two Strip resorts offering both a Vegas Loop station and a stop on the Las Vegas Monorail, giving guests two separate ways to get around without leaving the property.
The Boring Company just doubled its tunneling power in Nashville
The bigger news buried in Thursday’s announcement is what comes next. Boring Company has already secured its first permit to tunnel north of Sahara Avenue, extending the network beyond where it currently ends, even though permits to push the Loop toward downtown Las Vegas still haven’t been granted. Crews are also working on a two mile dual tunnel line running from Westgate to a planned station at 4744 Paradise Road, just north of Tropicana Avenue, that Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority CEO Steve Hill has said the company hopes to open in time for November’s Las Vegas Grand Prix.
Ridership has grown alongside the buildout. The Loop moved roughly 82,000 passengers during CONEXPO in early March, a total the company highlighted on its own X account at the time, and the system has now carried more than 4 million passengers through 11 open stations since it began running in 2021. The airport connector tunnels, meant to give the Loop a direct link to Harry Reid, have slipped past their original first quarter target and remain under construction, with Boring Company director Mike Baier saying that a full opening is still a few months out.
For Sahara, the calculation is straightforward. Convention traffic drives a large share of Loop ridership, and a station at the property’s front door gives conventiongoers one more reason to book rooms on the Strip’s north end instead of closer to the convention center itself.
The Boring Company’s newest tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla parts and no one is driving it
Elon Musk and SpaceX shrugs off the trading day Wall Street feared most
